PreviewNot yet reviewed. Cards on this preview are seed data waiting for the editors’ approval, so check anything before you cite it.
The Digital Historian’s Toolbox

Preview · 19 tools · 6 datasets · 75 projects · seeded October 2026

The tools and datasets historians actually used, and where.

Pull out a drawer to see what’s filed inside. Every card separates research that used a tool from the benchmarks that tested it.

  1. Mistral OCR (2 uses)
  2. World Historical Gazetteer (1 use)
  3. Gephi (1 use)
  4. Voyant Tools (1 use)
  5. eScriptorium (1 use)

Research + corpus-building uses. Benchmarks don’t count.

The drawers

A tool can be filed in more than one drawer
  • DRAWER I

    AI & History

    Machine learning, vision-language models and speech models. Every card here carries notes on where your sources go, how it was tested, and how it fails.

    Guide cards

    Counts research and corpus-building uses in the window, plus “I’m using this now” check-ins. Benchmarks don’t count.

    • tool · No. 014 AI

      Transkribus

      Upload scans of handwritten or printed documents and get transcriptions back, using public models or one you train on your own transcribed pages.

      At a glance
      Maker
      READ-COOP (European cooperative)
      Released
      2015
      Licence
      Proprietary
      Cost
      Free tier (50 credits/month); Scholar €99/yr; about 1 credit per page
      Runs
      Browser (EU cloud); API; on-premises for institutions
      Skill
      No code
      Historian’s notes
      Where your sources go Stored on READ-COOP servers in Austria. You keep ownership, but the terms let READ-COOP use your content to improve its services.
      How it’s been tested A 2022 review covers 381 publications using it. Error rates of about 4% on retrained Ottoman Turkish periodicals.
      Known problems on historical sources Accuracy drops on names, abbreviations, Latin and marginalia. A 12.7% error model was judged unusable without correction. Models trained on one source transfer unevenly.
      Used in research0

      No published research uses found yet. Using it in a project? Tell us.

      Used to build corpora2
      Tested in2
      Visit website
      Add a project that used it See it on the network Suggest a correction

      Nobody has said they’re using it in 2026 yet. “I’m using this now” asks you to sign in with ORCID. One count per person per year; it adds to Trending, and names are never shown.

      Last updated 14 Oct 2026 Not yet reviewed by the editors · Version history